KIRKUS REVIEW

The author waves a yellow flag of warning at smut’s bullying ubiquity in American popular culture, from the compromised position of being a cog in its wheel.

Porn is as it ever was, writes Reavill, the hellspawn of men in their 20s, “such tortured and bizarre anti-exemplars of the human race almost to deserve their own subspecies.” The problem is, he suggests, that while smut was once patrolled ground, these days it is the unavoidable secondhand smoke blown in our faces by television, radio and advertising. The writer knows whereof he speaks: He cut his writing teeth at Screw magazine and continues to contribute to Maxim and Penthouse. He is not calling for any abridgement of the First Amendment, but rather yearning for a sense of neighborliness, decorum and decency. Some freedom from free expression, as it were—as Groucho Marx once said to a woman with nine children, Reavill recalls, “I like my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth every once and a while.” The author makes some valid points regarding advertising, pop-ups on the Internet, and magazine covers, where hypersexualization is truly unavoidable. He stumbles, though, when it comes to TV, phone sex, books and fashion, areas in which his concern as a parent has more sway than he admits. Who is to say that he can’t offer alternatives: games, sports, movies of his choosing, music that isn’t laced with sex (though the alternative is usually invectives), reading a book out loud? If Reavill leaves his daughter’s recreational options up to the mainstream, he shouldn’t complain. And when he tenders correctives such as “insist on voluntary G-rated display policies,” all his good civil liberties intentions come unglued.

Inventiveness of personal responsibility is not Reavill’s strong suit, but his concern for our visual and aural everyday has merit. Sex, as he states, should be the glittering sand on the beach, not the stuff kicked in our faces by thugs.

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